I'm Peggy Scott Laborde, and welcome to New Orleans.

Pieces of the past.

We're taking a look at local history through photos from my collection and area archives.

Pontchartrain beach, the historic Southern railway station, the Saint Charles hotel.

Mark Twain, Lafcadio Hearne and Louis Armstrong, just part of the list of New Orleans places and people that will recall during the next half hour.

for over a century and a half, at the corner of Saint Charles and Common streets in the central business district stood at different times three buildings named the Saint Charles Hotel.

The first two, regarded as the finest hotels in the city, were lost to fire in 1896.

A third one opened and garnered a similar reputation as a fine hotel.

It was designed by renowned architect Thomas Sully.

It had lavish public spaces.

The lobby boasted Corinthian columns and an elaborate staircase.

Here's a photo at Christmas time in 1946, author Lyle Saxon actually resided at the Saint Charles after World War two.

He gave a live national radio broadcast on Mardi Gras Day from the hotel.

Business offices were located within the Saint Charles, including a branch of the Western Union Telegram service.

Radio had its studios within the hotel.

A then budding musician named Elvis Presley did an interview at the station in 1956.

The hotel featured a restaurant and a lounge named The Outrigger.

By 1959, it was known as the Sheraton Charles Hotel, and in 1967, the movie version of the popular novel called Hotel by Arthur Hailey was filmed using the Saint Charles as a setting.

I actually recalled going to a high school prom in one of the ballrooms.

Sadly, the hotel was torn down in 1974.

A decade went by and the Saint Charles Office building was constructed.

No longer a location for lodging.

This downtown corner is still a setting with lots of activity.

among local buildings that I wish were still with us.

Was the Southern Railway turn, also known as New Orleans Terminal.

It was built in 1908 on the Basin Street median at the intersection of downtown Canal Street.

Designed by famed architect Daniel Burnham, who also planned Washington DC's Union Station.

This terminal served numerous railway lines, notably southern.

It was the terminus for the Southerner, which linked our city to the northeast with New York as its final destination.

And there were waiting areas that were spacious and even included a restaurant.

A distinctive semicircular window graced the station's facade.

At one point, instead of newspapers, some newsboys handed out what were known of as Blue Books, a directory of local houses of ill repute in Storyville, which was located across the street from the station.

The red light district was shut down by 1970.

Sadly, the railway station was demolished in 1956 when all passenger service was relocated to the new Union Passenger Terminal nearby.

One of New Orleans lost landmarks was located on the edge of Uptown.

The original main branch of the New Orleans Public Library facing Lee circle, it was built in 1907 through the generosity of philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

He paid for the construction of public libraries nationwide.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

When they're building was torn down.

I mean, there's some there's so much to weep for.

And that's one of the things that I weep for is that building.

That was great.

There was a it was grass outside, you know, it was part of it was it was built up.

You had to walk up steps to go in, and you could sit out on that grass and read too, and we would skip the children's department altogether.

We would go upstairs and there was an enormous reading room with great big windows where you could get you could take books out of the stack, and you could come and find a table and sit there and read without ever checking the book out.

Those visits to the library inspired a passion that resulted in her life's work.

We would go back in the stacks and stacks, had green glass floors, and I would just sit down on the floor and go through book after book, you know?

And I remember reading a lot in that library.

Read Horror stories, English horror tales, which later very much influenced my writing.

We checked out a lot of books, and I was often painfully overdue and go in there and I'd give these long excuses about what happened and so forth, and I think I was able to strike some bargains.

And every now and then, every now and then, they'd say, you don't belong up here.

You belong in the children's section.

So we'd get banished to the children's section for a little while, but then we get back upstairs.

You know, the library, considered too small, was demolished in 1959.

Today, KMBC Plaza occupies the site.

We are blessed to still have streetcars today.

Back then, there were almost a dozen lines in operation, as you can see from the activity on Canal Street.

Notice the turn of some of the tracks.

Those were for trolleys whose route included the French Quarter.

The desire streetcar line went down Bourbon Street to the Bywater neighborhood and eventually back to Canal A brawl.

It was discontinued May 30th, 1948.

Ironically, Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize winning play A Streetcar Named Desire made its debut a little over six months before the Canal Street ferry, which crossed the Mississippi to get to Algiers, included space for cars.

Alas, in 2013, vehicle service was eliminated in favor of carrying passengers.

Only parking was once available in front of Jackson Square.

That changed in the 1970s, when the city adopted an outdoor mall concept.

And even though we're used to seeing mule drawn buggies in the quarter these days, this one was likely used to sell produce to residents and nearby neighborhoods.

There's no doubt that New Orleans has a colorful past, but there's one color that stirs memories of a gone but not forgotten drugstore.

And that's purple.

New Orleanians even had a name for the distinctive view known locally as k and B purple.

The purple packaging of K and B drugs that proved to be advertising genius started as a stroke of luck when another local merchant ordered for then declined delivery of a load of purple paper.

K and be bought the paper at a considerable discount.

The rest was history.

There would be no mistaking where a shopper had been when there was seen carrying those distinctive purple packages.

Gustav Katz was established in New Orleans as a trusted pharmacist when he befriended Sidney Best off, a successful drugstore owner from Memphis.

The two men became business partners, opening the first Katz and Best Off drugstore in 1905.

In a short time, NB drugstore sprang up throughout New Orleans.

Besides over-the-counter medications and prescriptions, the stores featured a potpourri of inventory, beauty products, and gardening supplies, to name a few.

The chain also launched products under its name, and the drugstores were a popular source for K and B brand liquor, as well as its ice cream.

In 1997, Rite Aid bought the NB chain, which had grown to 186 stores in the Gulf, South Texas and Tennessee.

The beloved drugstores are gone, but you can still see purple every Mardi Gras right there.

Besides Carnival signature green and gold.

While most attractions along the midway of New Orleans Pontchartrain Beach, or rides or games of skill, during the 1940s and into the 1960s, there was the Cockeyed Circus and Right Next Door, Laugh in the dark.

These were walk through attractions.

Cockeyed was an apt description, since there was a mirror maze, which certainly made you feel askew.

I also recall a jets of air coming from below the floor, which of course wreaked havoc with skirts and elicited more than a few screams of surprise.

Caring for the circus theme was a giant head of a clown, which quickly became the meeting spot for beach goers.

According to a recollection from Frank Jones in the book Pontchartrain Beach A Family Affair by Brian Batten, Katie Danaus Jones's stepfather, Alfred Willis, constructed the Clown Heads would framework beach owner and Brian's grandfather, Harry Batt senior, brought in a sculptor from Paris to create with plaster the iconic face.

In addition to his carpentry skills, Willis was also the captain of the beaches lifeguards.

The clown photo was taken by photographer Joe Buddy Jr.

He was a cameraman, a sub for almost 40 years, starting when the station was founded in 1948.

I got to know this kind, gentle man a few years before he retired.

Sensing a shared fondness for New Orleans history, he gave me the photo, which recalls a fun filled summer for many.

In 1877, Greek born writer Lafcadio Hearn moved from Cincinnati to New Orleans, quickly embracing what he considered a more laid back, almost Caribbean culture.

A quote from Hearn I'd rather live in New Orleans in sackcloth and ashes than to own the state of Ohio.

Initially freelancing for a Cincinnati paper, he soon found work with the New Orleans Daily City Item and later the Times Democrat.

While writing for the item, he also created and published 200 woodcuts of everyday life.

Unfortunately, after six months, he had to give up doing the woodcuts, which proved to be too much of a strain on his eyesight.

Having lost vision in one eye during a schoolyard skirmish.

In addition to casting a spotlight on corruption and local government, Hearn also wrote about New Orleans people and places, rituals including carnival and even voodoo.

Hearn served as an informal ambassador, raising the city's profile through his stories for such national publications as Harper's Weekly and Scribner's Magazine.

From his local experiences came books.

Gumbo, Zeb.

Little dictionary of Creole Proverbs and Cuisine Creole, a collection of recipes from local housewives and chefs.

That book helped introduce Creole cooking to a wider audience.

Hearn also wrote Cheeta a memory of Last Island, a novella based on the devastating hurricane of 1856.

In 1887, Hearn moved to Martinique.

As the French West Indies correspondent for Harper's Weekly.

Two years later, he moved to Japan, where he married and became a Japanese citizen.

But his decade long stay in New Orleans was time well spent for him and for us.

She wanted to leave Italy and go east to the Orient, but Pope Leo the 13th urged her to go west to America, where so many of her countrymen were poverty stricken and needed assistance.

Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

Arriving in New York City in 1889.

Three years later, she and her nuns came to New Orleans to tend the needs of local Italian, mostly Sicilian, immigrants.

The sisters occupied a large building on Saint Philip Street in the French Quarter and opened a school and later a day nursery, but the priority was to start an orphanage.

Since many children had lost their parents due to yellow fever outbreaks outgrowing their French Quarter facility, Mother Cabrini secured a donation of $75,000 from Captain and Mrs.

Salvatore presiding with those funds in 1905.

Cabrini was able to build an orphanage on Esplanade Avenue.

On viewing, the building is her bedroom, as well as many personal items along with her checkbook.

She died in 1917, but her missionary sisters of the Sacred Heart continued their work in New Orleans.

By 1959, the orphanage was converted into a Catholic girls high school.

Six years later, a modern structure was built on Bayou Saint John behind the original building.

Mother Cabrini became a naturalized citizen and as America's first saint.

But because of her local legacy, she is considered the original New Orleans Saint.

William Faulkner called him the father of American literature.

Mark Twain, whose actual name was Samuel Longhorn Clemens, visited New Orleans first while training to be a steamboat pilot in 1859.

He was 23.

He disembarked from his vessel, the S.S.

Alex Scott, and was mesmerized by what he saw.

It turned out to be March the 8th in a letter that he wrote to his sister Pamela.

He describes his experience.

I saw a hundred men, women and children in fine, fancy, splendid, ugly, coarse, ridiculous, grotesque, laughable costumes and the truth flashed upon me.

This is Mardi Gras.

It was Mardi Gras.

Twain goes into detail concerning the spectacle.

The streets were soon full of Mardi Gras, representing giants, Indians, monks, priests, clowns, birds, beasts, everything, in fact, that one could imagine.

The free and easy women turned out on mass, and their costumes and actions were very trying to modest eyes.

He concludes his letter with certainly New Orleans seldom does things by halves.

Almost a quarter of a century later, in April 1882, Twain was back in New Orleans.

Now well-established as a popular writer, he was traveling along the river again to gather material for his memoir, life on the Mississippi.

In his recollections, it wasn't just Mardi Gras that left an impression this time.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

collection.

By the 1920s, the French Quarter was considered a rundown neighborhood, but still full of charm.

The rent inexpensive.

New Orleans he gained a reputation as an exotic setting, a place where you could be yourself.

Amuse for writers.

A recent transplant, Sherwood Anderson, was enjoying the success of his novel Winesburg, Ohio.

He beckoned budding authors to the city.

In 1924, he and his wife moved into 540 B Saint Peter's Street, one of the historic Torba Apartments.

They welcomed such literary luminaries as William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Thomas Wolfe, and Lyle Saxon, who would go on to write local history books and serve as the editor for the Works Progress Administration Guide to New Orleans, produced by the Federal Writers Project.

Faulkner and the Andersons were especially close.

The young writer actually stayed with the couple when he first came to the city.

He was working on his first novel, Soldiers Pay.

While in New Orleans, he wrote prose sketches that appeared in the Times-Picayune and The Double Dealer.

A short lived but influential local literary magazine that included the works of Ernest Hemingway and Robert Penn Warren.

In March of 1925, Faulkner moved into an apartment at 624 Pirates Alley with Anderson's friend, artist William Spratly.

Today, it's the home of Faulkner House books.

He and Spradling published a short book of quips and illustrations of some of their creative friends, satirical and with a bit of a bite.

It was called Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles.

A few years later, Faulkner wrote a novel called mosquitoes.

Drawing from his New Orleans experiences.

The plot is based on a yacht cruise he took with Anderson and friends on Lake Pontchartrain.

As it turns out, a young Lillian Hellman, who had grown up partially in New Orleans, recommended the novel to New York publisher Horace Live.

Flight Faulkner spent a total of six months in New Orleans.

Yet another work, pylon, was also inspired by his time in the city.

Before he arrived, he was primarily a poet.

After he left, he was on his way to becoming a Nobel Prize winning novelist and the author of more than 30 books.

Indeed, William Faulkner was just one of many writers inspired by a muse named New Orleans, and Jazz great Louis Armstrong spent his first 21 years in New Orleans.

Fortunately, he met some people along the way who became mentors.

Growing up in poverty with his mother, May Anne, and sister, Beatrice, Little Louis had a variety of jobs, including working for the family who helped him purchase a cornet as a child.

His neighborhood included South Rampart Street, where he and friends sang on the street for a change.

My beauty, that was an early tune, was on That's Where My Love Was gone, gone, gone.

He ended up being arrested on New Year's Eve 1912 for shooting off a gun.

He was sent to what was known of as the Colored Waves home.

Music teacher Peter Davis put together a band there and gave lessons.

Louis eventually became the group's leader.

Jazz funerals and parades put on by local social aid and pleasure clubs were a common sight in the 19 tens.

Louis got to know local bandleader Joe King Oliver, a cornet and trumpet player who took the now teenager under his wing.

Armstrong began playing around town and caught the ear of pianist Fate Marable, who hired musicians for the first line of Mississippi riverboats that featured jazz.

It was during his time on the riverboats that Louis learned how to read music.

It was also a chance to travel beyond New Orleans.

In 1922, he received a telegram from King Oliver, who had moved to Chicago a few years earlier to play at the Lincoln Gardens dance hall and nightclub.

Oliver had a job for his protege with his suitcase, music instrument and a fish sandwich from his mom.

Louis boarded a train, and of course, the rest is American music history.

American music history.

Theodore Lilienthal was one of the city's most successful 19th century New Orleans photographers.

He saw Carte the Visitors, a two and a half by four inch photo that was used as a memento are calling card.

These photos were popular internationally from the 1860s until the 1880s.

Many American photographers sold carte to visitors of then famous people.

This is Civil War General Benjamin Butler, who was in charge of New Orleans during the Union occupation.

And here's the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, who was a royal guest at the 1872 Mardi Gras in time for the first Rex parade.

By the 1880s, the larger cabinet card had gained more of a following.

It was designed to be displayed on your cabinet.

What a wonderful way to get a glimpse of 19th century Orleanians.

The cabinet cards were 4.25in by 6.5in, and usually included the name of the photographic studio.

Just as today, these were taken for special occasions.

The birth of a baby.

First communion was especially popular then.

This is my paternal grandmother, Leona Smith Scott.

And of course, weddings were commemorated.

Most of the photographers were conveniently located downtown.

And before we leave, let's experience nights out in New Orleans in 1964.

And then ten years later.

On the cover of This Week in New Orleans is City Parks story land.

Thankfully still a vibrant attraction today.

The movie it's a mad, mad, mad, Mad World was playing at the Martin Cinerama on Tulane Avenue.

And for a slice of history, there was the Musée Catie, a wax museum in the French Quarter that features some of the city's historical figures.

Buck, 49, had a steak with that incredible price at their locations on Airline Highway and Bourbon Street.

Beloved clarinetist Pete Fountain had his own club on Bourbon for many years.

In just a few blocks away was Tony's Pizza and Spaghetti House.

If you wanted to imagine yourself in an exotic locale, there was the Ballet High restaurant at Pontchartrain Beach.

The Bally's decor evoked Apollo in Paradise.

And why not take a harbor tour on the steamer president?

An art Deco masterpiece that often featured local jazz bands.

What would have been some choices for a night on the town in 1974?

Thanks to a copy of the Today in New Orleans tourist guide.

We can see that the options were many.

There was Tea Partiers restaurant, famous for wild game and lobster dishes, including one called lobster Cadastre, a mix of seafood.

Another possibility was Cobb's, with an old Bavaria setting and a menu of German and American cuisine.

Incredibly, the price of a four course dinner there $5.50.

Over at the Fairmont, now Roosevelt Hotel.

Singer Eddie Adams was the headliner at the famed Blue Room Supper Club.

Chris Owens, known for her a spirited Latin dancing, did three shows on weeknights and on Friday and Saturday a show at 2 a.m.

from her Bourbon Street nightclub.

Also on Bourbon was the Stage Door Canteen, open until 4 a.m.. Alive!

Big band played swing music from the 1940s.

The Metairie Entertainment District, known of as Fat City, boasted numerous restaurants and nightclubs.

There was Glen's and still with us, Drago's with oysters on the half shell, and much more.

Nightclubs included Sancho Panza and the Spanish Galleon.

After dinner and dancing or a show, an evening in Fat City could conclude with coffee and beignets are donuts, as locals call them.

At the morning call, which had recently moved from the French Quarter.

By the way, Morning Call has since returned to New Orleans.

memories of Christmas in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s would most certainly include downtown Canal Street.

Of course, getting your picture taken with Santa was a must.

This is little me.

I guess I was mesmerized by being in the presence of such a celebrity.

At the top of Monica Barth Turner's photo with Santa.

You can actually see a mr.

Bingle doll, which means that this photo was taken in Maison Blanche department store.

Biggles initials were MB, the same as the store name.

He was a mascot for the popular retail establishment.

Bengal still exists today thanks to Dillard's.

D.H.

Holmes department store was another must visit along Canal Street with its elaborate holiday windows.

Further down the street was the magnificent home of the centrality family from the mid 40s into the mid-sixties.

Mrs.

Myra Collins Santana and her husband Sal created a winter wonderland.

The sentences even inspired a young.

Al Copeland, founder of Popeye's famous fried chicken, who would go on to lavishly decorate his own home for Christmas.

Thanks for reminiscing, and let's all strive for a future that creates great memories for everyone.